by Karl Quentin
Ned Danvers, Head Boy, brought the gym-shoe sole hard down across the upturned buttocks of Carstairs major. The contrast between their apparel was almost as great as the contrast in their positions: Danvers, whip smart in smoking jacket, crisp white shirt, satin waistcoat and sharply creased black trousers; Carstairs, trousers round his ankles, shirt and blazer tail high, ridiculous in white cotton aertex underpants. Danvers, dominant and in control, slippering coldly; Carstairs, controlled and under discipline, wincing and gasping red faced as his bottom burned and reddened even more. And yet both were teenage pupils at Lacing College, only a few years separating them: Danvers just nineteen, Carstairs sixteen. But Carstairs was Danvers' 'slavey', and Danvers was a Rod.
Whack! Whopp! Whapp! Danvers tanned on, the sheer blazing blast of the rubber sole bringing shameful tears to Carstairs' eyes and soft mewling gasps to his lips. He knew all too well that at all costs he must not blub! He gripped the arms of the big armchair as tightly as he could and desperately kept his posterior well elevated. Whack! Whopp! Whapp! The force of the impacts drove him forwards into the chair, and keeping his bottom up and biting his tongue were becoming harder and harder to combine. Whack! Whopp! Whapp!
"Ooooh! Oww! Danvers please! Oh crikey! Ow! Ow! Ow!"
Some way behind spanker and spanked, another young man was sprawled over an armchair by a mullioned window, one hand holding a gold-plated fountain pen and a copy of The Times, the other a Black Russian cigarette on which he was languidly drawing from time to time. "For God's sake, Danny, can't you make your slavey pipe down when you're whacking him, I'm trying to complete the crossword you know."
Whack! Whopp! Whapp! "You heard Mr Forthpike," said Danvers. "Keep it buttoned, boy."
The slipper rose and fell, inexorably. Carstairs could feel a monstrous blub coming on. Oh how it scalded! In a moment he would break down, and then...
He was saved by the sudden bursting open of the study door, as a carrot-topped youth with a wide-mouthed freckled face made a dramatic entrance. "I say you fellows!" said the third resident of the Rods' study in great excitement. "Have you heard the latest? I just got it from Mr Renfrew!"
Whack! Whopp! Whapp! "What's the latest, Howard?" asked Danvers, not letting up his slippering rhythm for a second.
"It's the Old Man! He's really gone gaga this time! He plans to admit girls into the sixth form! It's going to happen next week!"
"Girls?!" exclaimed Ned Danvers and Roderick Forthpike as one, and this time Danvers did lower the slipper.
"It's true!" Alan Howard assured them. "Word of honour! Thirty girls will be joining us in the sixth form next week. Isn't that dreadful? At Lacing College too!"
"Well," reflected Forthpike, "yes it is, tradition and all that thrown to the winds. But I suppose there is another side to it." He visualized a naked nineteen year old looking up at him from his bed, her breasts impossibly perky as she reached out for his mighty tool...
Danvers looked down at Carstairs' backside in his childish white skimpies, a deep red stain glowing in his skin beyond the elastic of the briefs. He had a sudden vision of a female posterior in the same position, with the same red tone, sporting some flimsy transparent wisp of silk and lace. Hmm. "Pikey, old man, could you just take my boots that this useless slavey has made such a pig's ear of polishing and chuck 'em out of the window? There's a big muddy puddle just underneath." He turned back to the bottom he was putting through its paces. "When I've finished beating you, Carstairs, you can go downstairs and fetch back my muddy boots. Then you can clean and polish them again, and do it properly this time so that I can see my face in them. Understood? Boy?"
"Y-yes Danvers," said the slippered youth in a tremulous voice. But he too had taken in the news about the arrival of girls, and now the awful pulsing sheet of scorch in his bum was doing weird and wonderful things to that muscle in the underside of his penis as he thought of them. He didn't think he was going to blub after all.
Whack! Whopp! Whapp!
Lacing College: the premier, the oldest public school in all the benighted shires of Merrie Old England. Its nearest rival, Eton College, was founded as recently as 1440; whereas Lacing College was founded, give or take a few breaks in existence and name changes, by Edward the Confessor in the eleventh century, and he was not only a king, but a saint! Eat your heart out, Henry VI!
Lacing College differed in several ways from other public (i.e., private) schools: it had its own arcane customs, like The Apotheosis of Saint Edward on his saint's day, and the Lacing Pond Game, for instance. It had its own vocabulary too: different kinds of beatings had their own nicknames; prefects were known as Rods; where at other schools the younger boys who had to work for prefects were known as fags, at Lacing they were called slaveys. And they were not so young either: boys remained slaveys until their seventeenth birthdays. But the most distinctive feature of Lacing College at the date of our tale - 1969 - was its Headmaster, Dr Andrew Francis.
Dr Francis was a bona fide English eccentric, if you like. A fearsome stickler for tradition, he nonetheless stood at the very forefront of the counterculture. As a much younger man, with a PhD in chemistry, he had worked with a famous scientist in the forties on the synthesizing of LSD, and had never stopped dropping a tab or two every season ever since. He had also sampled yage in the jungles of central America. Any apparently incompatible views he reconciled by invoking ancient mind-expanding traditions, probably coming originally from Lemuria or the lost continent of Mu, and claiming that the traditions of Lacing College were a small part of these.
His pupils referred to him in fondness and fear as the Old Man; fondness because of his far-outness (the Great Society version of White Rabbit could often be heard drifting out of his study windows), and fear because of his rigour and prowess with the cane. One Lacing tradition that he upheld with the utmost scrupulousness was that of corporal punishment; indeed, a caning was itself referred to as 'a lacing'. He was immune to all criticism on this point.
So although everyone was stunned, no one was really surprised when Dr Francis announced out of the blue to the staffroom one day that he had decided to admit girls to the sixth form as soon as possible.
"B-but, Headmaster! Girls?!" spluttered Mr Renfrew, head of upper school. He was such an uptight old straight. "Lacing College has been a boys' school for one thousand years, give or take some breaks and changes of name. How can you think of throwing away that glorious tradition?"
"I am not throwing away any tradition, man," replied the Old Man. "I am reuniting Lacing College with a far older tradition, the tradition of the Great Goddess herself. For all those long years we have been separated from the eternal Feminine, apart from matron of course (he bowed to Mrs Protheroe) and our esteemed secretary Miss Leonard. Now the Mother, Cybele, Ishtar, Gaia, what you will, shall be with us once more in the flesh of teenage girls. I intend to have Mr Parker the Head Gardener lay out a giant vulva on the lawns in pink and red flowers, with a rosebush as clitoris. This shall be a token of the return of the Goddess to our shores. Woman shall be the saviour of the world."
Now everyone in the staffroom knew that in his private garden Dr Francis grew cannabis sativa, and in the autumn near the woods he harvested a fine crop of psylocibin mushrooms. They assumed that these crops had something to do with the crazy visions he was expounding. But they also knew that if they wanted to draw him away from his craziest ideas, he had to be allowed to put into effect his less crazy: like admitting females to Lacing College. Only Dr Renfrew forgot this wise maxim in the heat of his horror at...
"Vulva! Clitoris!"
"Yes, Renfrew, clitoris. You had heard of such a thing, I suppose? Or maybe you have never succeeded in locating one."
The head of Classics thought it was time to intervene. "Headmaster, I am sure we all applaud the far-sighted wisdom of your proposal to enrol girls in the sixth form. But your ideas about replanting the lawns - surely our parents will not be happy with that? And they do keep us in employment paying our handsome fees."
"Parents! Khalil Gibran says-"
"And I'm sure we all agree with Carol Gibbon on that score. But seriously, Headmaster, should we not walk before we can run? For instance, how will the sudden appearance of girls fit in with our strict disciplinary policy?"
"Oh I've already sussed that."
"But surely, Headmaster, you are not intending to cane girls?"
"Good God no! No, that would be most inappropriate, might lead the straights to draw the wrong conclusions. No, I thought Matron could handle all that."
"Me, Headmaster?"
"Yes Matron. You have brought up four girls, have you not?"
"Ah I follow you now Headmaster! Yes indeed, I think I know a thing or two about dealing with obstreperous teenage girls! I could write the book. Over the knee, knickers down, and a good sound dose of the hairbrush. Repeat as often as necessary, which in my experience is very often indeed. You want me to spank your girls when they misbehave, Headmaster?"
"Exactly so, Matron. Thank you for volunteering. Well now, is there anything else we need to discuss?"
"Yes there is!" said the head of Classics. "We have no female teachers at this school. Surely your proposal-"
"It is not a proposal," interrupted the Headmaster, "as it is already in motion. I have already employed three excellent females to concentrate on the girls' education, though of course they will also teach the men."
"But... I hope at least these ladies are experienced respectable middle-aged women, unlikely to give the men inappropriate ideas?"
"Not at all! I have employed three rather pretty but very academically sound young ladies. Youth is badly needed in this staff room. Youth, high spirits, the very image of the Goddess herself in her maiden aspect. Well, if there are no further questions, I take it we are agreed? Without the vulva on the lawns perhaps? Excellent!"
Two days later three young women got out of the same taxi outside the great entrance of Lacing College. Just as Dr Francis had said, (but it had been a gross understatement), they were rather pretty. Their names were Lucy Wilson, Wendy Keppel, and Charlotte Beatty. Lucy, the youngest by three months, was also the smallest at five two in stocking feet. Her long brown hair gleamed in the sunshine as she received her suitcase from the driver, unwilling to let him carry it for her. She had been engaged as an English teacher. Charlotte, the tallest, was also the most striking because of her mane of coppery curls that tumbled around her shoulders and half concealed her soft gentle face, though in truth she was a PE teacher and a maths teacher to boot. She also sported a stunning length of leg beneath the hem of a paisley micro skirt. Finally blonde ponytailed Wendy, a languages teacher, looked up in wonder at the four tall pillars supporting the canopy of the entrance and tried to quell her uneasy feeling that she was an impostor in such a place.
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